Pre-Service Teacher Candidates’ Perceptions of Classroom-Based Mixed-Reality Simulations

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper is interesting and relevant within the field of educational sciences. It has an adequate structure, a well-founded theoretical framework, the method is coherent, the results are well  described and, finally, the conclusions and implications are connected to the objective.

However, some of the aspects that need to be improved are:

Add a section between the "literature review" and "methods" that has "objectives" as its title and in which the objectives are described. These objectives could be separated into: general objective and specific objectives. This would give importance to the objectives and would also serve to unite the article.

Regarding the participants, more information should be given about them, that is, gender, ages, academic record, experience... This information may be important to be able to create profiles in future research.

In the results, tables should not be cut into different pages.

The results should be given in percentages alone or in numbers, but if they are given in both it can create confusion. They must also have decimals, you cannot realize that for n=5 it is 8% and for n=4 it is 6% and for n=2 it is 3%, the decimals are important to define the results.

It can be confusing that sometimes the total n are different (table 1=63, table 2=49, table 3=47), this should be explained in detail

In section 4.3 it says “most teacher” but it would be convenient to specify the exact number.

The conclusions section could be improved by adding references from the literature review.

References do not follow the journal's standards. References should be numbered in order of appearance in the text.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for taking the time to review this manuscript. Please find the detailed responses in the attachment below. The authors deeply appreciate your input and recommendations to improve our article. We are very grateful for the wonderful feedback to improve our article. Onwards.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

See attached.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Quality of English is adequate. 

Check for passive tense. 

Check for consistency of spelling programmes vs. programs (in abstract).

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for taking the time to review this manuscript. Please find the detailed responses in the attachment below. The authors deeply appreciate your input and recommendations to improve our article. We are very grateful for the wonderful feedback to improve our article. Onwards.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This topic is relevant and important. MRS has grown in popularity over the last decade, and readership would find this topic timely and interesting. I appreciate the work the authors have done. 

Most of my concerns lie with methodology. While no personal identifying information is used--participants wrote responses to 3 open-ended questions anonymously--the university was named, as were the courses and dates, and only verbal consent was acquired. I have concerns about the design of the qualitative study and the analysis. While the authors signify the use of a qualitative research design, there are no citations or specifics. Also, thematic analysis is said to have been used, but there are no citations to indicate approaches (Saldaña, for instance) or clear methods or data analysis processes. Some questions that I have: how did authors form the research study? How did they code the data? Circling and highlighting is indicated, but what was circled and highlighted? Was it repeated phrases? If this is the case, it sounds like in vivo coding was possibly used for the initial round of coding, but I am unsure. Authors use the term "themes" to describe the categories of each table and later use "theme" again when synthesizing results. Attention is needed to ensure validity and credibility of this data collection and analysis. Also, this will strengthen the authors' arguments and help us readers understand the findings and how they contribute to the greater understanding of tools used in teaching education. In their findings, both authors go on to give examples from the data, which helped support their claims. Have the authors considered content analysis as a methodological approach? How the data was presented and explained led me to wonder if perhaps content analysis would be a good fit for the work they seek to undertake. 

With clearer and stronger methodology and study design, this research study has significance within the teacher education research field. 

Note: Citations are not formatted properly within the template guidelines. 

English was proficient with minor grammatical errors. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for taking the time to review this manuscript. Please find the detailed responses in the attachment below. The authors deeply appreciate your input and recommendations to improve our article. We are very grateful for the wonderful feedback to improve our article. Onwards.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for your comprehensive addressing of my reviewer comments. I believe this improved the paper sufficiently for publication. 

Reviewer 3 Report

Revisions adequately address the initial concerns in the first draft, especially the methodological questions and analysis. This article is a thoughtful analysis and approach when utilizing and implementing MRS.